Right now, there is more to the pro lacrosse audience than the announced attendance
After two weeks, the PLL has delivered on quite a few of the things it has set out to do. It’s put a great product on the field with close, exciting games and incredibly high level lacrosse. It’s given us access to players both in person and via social media channels. There’s digital content out there on YouTube other media all the time. Broadcasts have been at a level that the sport has never seen. This past Sunday, they played a regular season professional field lacrosse game on NB-effing-C. Everything about that is great for pro lacrosse.
The glaring negative, and a quick scroll through good old #lacrossetwitter will affirm this, is that it’s just not translating to butts in seats. Lots of screengrabs and photos with captions like “stadium looks a little empty…” or “I expected more people that this” abound. 13k announced attendance for opening weekend at Gillette, and about 10k announced for the weekend at Red Bull Arena. There’s a little massaging in there, as the Saturday attendance is pretty much the attendance for the day counted twice. I went to two games at Gillette because I went to the Saturday double header, so I count as two people. We haven’t seen the TV ratings for either weekend yet, take that however you want.
Of course, this leads people to spout molten lava takes about the league already failing, the sky falling, and all of the lacrosse world descending into a hunger games hellscape. Let’s all just pump the brakes. Consider, a bit, what really needs to be happening right now for pro lacrosse. Yes, selling out 20,000 seat venues would be excellent. I can’t wait for that to be reality. It just isn’t right now. To go from what previous years of pro lacrosse were doing attendance-wise to packing MLS stadiums in one offseason, regardless of the enormous efforts of the PLL to get out there in front of as many people as possible, would be setting the bar a bit high. Last year’s average attendance for an MLL game was around 3,600. That number gets lifted by Denver who always does outstanding attendance and averaged 7,000 a game. Don’t get me wrong here, the PLL did a ton in the way of exposure, visibility, and marketing, but if you think what they did translates to another 12–15k in attendance for pro lacrosse games in one year, right out of the gate, I’ve got a non-offset head to sell you.
Keep things in perspective, and just get the audience to grow every week. If the ridiculous display put on by Connor Fields, Miles Thompson, and the two-bomb squad of the Chaos was seen by some new fans, who only caught the game because it was on network television, that’s awesome. Because maybe those people now tune in next week, or buy the PLL package on NBC gold, or even check to see when the PLL is in town and buy a ticket. Or a ticket for their local MLL team. It doesn’t really matter to me, a new pro lacrosse fan is a win for this sport, period.
Each week, the question shouldn’t be “why didn’t they pack the stadium this week”, it should be “how many new fans came to pro lacrosse this week”. I don’t care if the new fans decide to hit a PLL tour stop or buy tickets to a few Atlanta Blaze home games. Hopefully both. Either way, if pro field lacrosse is to survive and thrive, it will need more than the existing fan base. The decisions made by the PLL to this point appear to be driven by an effort to get pro lacrosse in front of as many people and on as many screens as possible. The big question is how to take all this and turn it into ticket sales. Nobody can glean any meaningful conclusion from two weeks of attendance numbers in a brand new league.
There is one more semi-tricky thing here. The broadcast’s on NBC have been so good, I might even prefer to watch the sport from home. Allow me to make an EXTREMELY crude comparison, but consider the NFL game experience. I’d be perfectly fine never going to an NFL game again. Getting to the stadium sucks, the in-stadium experience is a little bland, and in football’s case it’s cost prohibitive. There’s also a million things around football (fantasy, gambling, etc) that enhance the experience from your couch. I can trek to a game, or I can stay home with the Red Zone channel and enjoy the broadcast that’s a ton of fun to watch. After a weekend of attending a PLL double-header and watching the games on TV, at this point, I think I’d rather enjoy the broadcasts. What they’re doing in that space is way more fun and interesting that what happens in the stadium on game day.
Ultimately, the league needs at least a few years of runway to grow that fan base to a place where attendance numbers reach what some people seem to think they should have been at from the jump. There are people who played lacrosse growing up, who played in college, who are still casual college lacrosse fans, and are only just now learning about the PLL, because they caught the game on NBC. The lacrosse fan world is a tiny one, and the pro lacrosse fan world is a tiny subset of it. Growing it takes time. We all want lacrosse to be the sport that gets talked about when you walk into the office the day after a great game and all that, but that doesn’t happen overnight.
